Just a brief word on HP, especially its buildings inside as most of you might not be aware of her past. Apart from the Farr Inn and the Anderson Lodge which were built by the English Planters during colonial era, all the other structures are results of the mega potato farm that saw HP lose most of her forest making it this grassy plain. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, well I’ll leave your capable thinking to decide. So these buildings had been used as storage for potatoes and fertilizers, staff quarters and other purposes. If you visit the Moon Plains where they still have a government-owned seed potato farm, you can get an idea what it must’ve been at HP before being named as a wildlife park.

So we planned alternative options to visit on the way and I was long overdue for a visit to Moon Plains and so was Hasi. We then planned to be there by 6.30am in order to get the best out of the morning rays. Hasi then came up with the idea of visiting Single Tree Hill aka One Tree Hill, the 10th highest mountain in SL with a height of 2100m. So that sealed the first day and we decided to reach HP afterwards. On the 25th Jun, we left home around 3am and having made excellent ground arrived at Nuwara Eliya by 6.10am.

I have always felt very sentimental about Great Western coz it was the turning point in my hiking life. When I went to GW last time, I told Morgan that we must camp on the summit one day and get the ultimate feeling of this beautiful lady. Oh, please check out the note I’ve put in the box at the top regarding GW coming down the list of Highest Mountains of Sri Lanka to the 7th place. It’s a mystery what this Kudahagala is and the Wikipedia gives no information as to its location, even the district. I wonder if this is the Agra-Bopath at HP coz there’s another mountain further down the list named Mahakudahagala at the 11th place with a height of 2096m. Casual search on Google didn’t yield anything fruitful either. Hopefully, one of you might be able to shed some light into this subject.

Let’s move on and start our journey, shall we? Anyway, she coming down the list was not a very happy thought for me. I wanted to take my hiking partner in the first journey, Hari with me but he wasn’t that sentimental about GW like me and decided to focus on something he’s not done before as the list of our to-do-things keep growing longer every passing day. So I was down to Uncle Tony, Atha and Prasa. Unfortunately, Tony had to pull out at the last minute leaving the three of us and we were in no mood to back off. Oh Atha too bought a tent with me so we wanted to try our tents at 2000+m.

Copyright 2016 Lakdasun.org - Please obtain permission from the author before duplicating, re-publishing or adapting content of a trip report

Best Viewed with Minimim Horizontal Resolution of 1024 Pixels | Site Tested for IE7, Firefox and Chrome